Blender 2.37A lengthy 5 months development time... so a release packed with interesting new features and improvements! The most noteworthy additions are the Soft Body system, the new incremental Subdivision Surface code, and the full recode of the internal Transformation system, allowing much more control and flexibility.

Transform WidgetsAs result of the Transformation Tools recode, we can now finally add widgets to have easy access to (constrainted) translation, rotation and scaling. Widgets can be aligned global, local to Objects and to normals in Edit Mode as well.

Soft BodyEach Object in Blender now can get a "Soft Body" effect applied. Once applied, the softbody system converts vertex locations to free moving particles... great for animating flexible objects, for wriggling skin and even for cloth simulations.

Force Fields and DeflectionEspecially for Soft Body a new force field, Wind, has been added. Also deflections (collisions) are possible between soft objects and Meshes.

Incremental Subdivision SurfacesBest feature of Daniel Dunbar's new "CCG" SubSurf system is its tremendous speed improvement. This mostly thanks to detecting incremental changes while editing. Also creases and UV texture support has been improved.

Transparent FilteringBlender now supports transparent rendering with filtering, by use of a new method which uses both Alpha and Filter combined. Ray-traced images now also deliver correct a alpha layer.

Render threads, true color & true orthoThree more options in the render core. Owners of dual CPU systems can now render twice as fast! Color definition internally is full 4x32 bits (was 4x16) and the ortho render code was refreshed.

Python ScriptingAnother long list of new features in the Python API, with new modules and advanced inegration of scripts in the Blender Window system using "Space Handlers". With a special thanks to Jacques Guignot, we've dedicated this release to him.

Game EngineNew Python Armature options, Z-offset materials, and SDL support for Joysticks.

And what's more new!Creating full pages with logs per new feature would postpone the release another month. So check this page for a full listing of all new features in 2.37. (Image from blender3d.org gallery, Sacha Goedegebure)

Bug FixesIn the past 5 months, over 600 reports were handled. Still, the total amount of open issues for Blender is less than thirty at the moment of release, quite impressive! (Image from blender3d.org gallery, Alex Cope)

Important notesNew TimeLine window isn't upward compatible... that means that older Blender releases crash on reading files with a TimeLine window active. This crash has been fixed in 2.37 to not happen again when we add new window types, but that won't help older versions. :)Yafray: Support was added for options for the upcoming release of Yafray. At this moment we're still waiting for that... documents will be published later too.

Development notes

OSX XCode project files added in cvs

BIG warning hunt with 100s of fixes.

Cleanup of ImBuf code

Added FTGL to extern/ modules

Added texture draw support for icons, not used yet

openEXR preparations were uncommitted and postponed to next release

cleanup of wrong inclusion of BLI_winstuff.h in files. NOTE: BLI_winstuff.h was meant to be a wrapper around windows.h to handle undefining various crap that windows.h defines.

Mesh drawing code now is abstracted with the DerivedMesh system. Check blenkernel/intern/.

use the BLI_string functions! in blenlib/BLI_blenlib.h

First implementation for dependency graph solving added. Now only used to sort the object list in Scenes, for correct order of evaluation.

Makefile changes for future support of 64 bits compile, testing with SGI Prism.